Although we have been experiencing a decrease in violent crime across America in recent years, high crime rate urban centers are experiencing an epidemic.
In 2012, the FBI reported that incidents of violent crime in the United States had decreased to a rate of 386 per 100k population. The statistics in the highest crime rate cities, however, tell a very different story.
2012 TOP 10 URBAN VIOLENT CRIME RATE STATISTICS
(National Average - 386 per 100k population)
Gary Slutkin, M.D., Professor of Epidemiology and International Health at the University of Illinois/Chicago School of Public Health, mapped the violent crime statistics in the United States in exactly the same way that the Center for Disease Control maps the outbreak of infectious disease around the world. He concluded that violent crime is a disease that infects certain local populations and should be treated with a similar scientific approach.
The research on adolescent development suggests that young people engage in delinquency because it is normative. Prolonged exposure to delinquency and violence results in the spread and transmission of those behaviors. Through long-term exposure, those behaviors become individual and community norms and require interruption before they will be changed.
Dr. Slutkin's mission is to change our national mindset away from “bad” people to people with “health” problems. If we can convince more and more people to see violence as a disease, then we can treat it accordingly by stopping the epidemic, reversing it, and curing it.
To change a culture, credible messengers who are trusted by the community, must work with high risk youth to provide advice, counsel, mentoring, and alternatives to delinquency or violence. Dr. Slutkin says, “Trained community health workers need to go deep, to immerse themselves within the community for a substantial period of time in order to affect individual behavior and community norm change.”
In 2000, Dr. Slutkin founded Ceasefire Chicago with the goal of reducing shootings and homicides in Chicago. In its first year the program reduced shootings by 67%. Now known as Cure Violence, Dr. Slutkin’s program has been expanded to Baltimore, New York, New Orleans, Oakland, Puerto Rico, and other sites.
In June 2009, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, Jr. Referenced Cure Violence as an example of “a rational, data-driven, evidence-based, smart approach to crime.”
